On the Paper Trail: Weird Careers vs Virtual Apprentice

Hoo boy, have we got an interesting pair of book for you today on the trail. On the left it is weird careers in science while on the right is the virtual apprentice. Both book clock under 70 pages and if you could not guess as of the covers, they were geared to the teenage audience and boy does it show. Now to have book to teens about various career paths and letting them know what is involved is something that I think EVERYONE should embrace, but sometimes they could be made of fail.

First the Weird Career, it has some filler that confused me. Do teens need a chapter on the types of video games that are out on the market? I could assume that if they picked up this book that they had a good chance of playing games in the past before and could omit that section for something more interesting for them to understand. It does go into the amount of work it takes to get the various aspect of game development and include a short interview with Will Wright that had some good points about his past, including how he did not finish college but still managed to find a way into the industry.

Virtual Apprentice on the other hand...well to put it bluntly it is too rad to be entertaining. I do not mean the good rad, I mean the Save by the Bell 90s rad that when looking at it you wonder if they had any sense into what they are doing. This book does include a nice Q & A section with various people in the industry that work day to day on games however the majority of the questions asked were done by children ages 7-11 and are more Nintendo Power related then actually job related.

If I were a teenager looking at these there is no way in hell I would have a good idea on what either one of the books were trying to appeal to, but if I must pick up one to give to a small child interested in the ins and out of the game industry, weird careers gets the nod since it does not assume you are functionally dumb about video games and tries to inform you about things you may not know.

Wow...that was painful next time I am going out of the YA section and into the grown up area to find something with some meat on it.